Since the beginning of the 1980s, migration and asylum policy in Europe has increasingly been elaborated in supranational forums and implemented by transnational actors. I argue that a venue-shopping framework is best suited to account for the timing, form and content of European co-operation in this area. The venues less amenable to restrictive migration control policy are national high courts, other ministries and migrant-aid organizations. Building upon pre-existing policy settings and developing new policy frames, governments have circumvented national constraints on migration control by creating transnational co-operation mechanisms dominated by law and order officials, with EU institutions playing a minor role. European transgovernmental working groups have avoided judicial scrutiny, eliminated other national adversaries and enlisted the help of transnational actors such as transit countries and carriers.

The ability of European nation-states to control migration has been at the forefront of the immigration debate. Some scholars have argued that international human rights and the freedom of circulation required by a global economy and regional markets are the two sides of a liberal regime that undermine the sovereignty of nation-states. Others have gone even further and declared the double closure of territorial sovereignty and national citizenship to be outmoded concepts. This article inscribes itself in that debate by answering the following questions: (a) To what extent do international legal instruments constrain the actions of national policy makers? and (b) How have nation-states reacted to international constraints and problems of policy implementation? Focusing on Council of Europe's jurisprudence, the authors assess the extent to which national courts have incorporated European norms and governments take them into account. The article examines ways that national policy makers have responded by shifting the institutional locations of policy making. In evaluating state responses, the article identifies the devolution of decision making upward to intergovernmental fora, downward to local authorities, and outward to nonstate actors.

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This account reviews the state of the literature on migration since the West European Politics special issue on migration was published in 1994. Particular attention is dedicated to the theme of immigration control and the critical question of policy gaps between immigration policy goals and outcomes. Regarding policy gaps, we identify three dimensions of this thesis that are addressed in some form by the contributors to the volume. These include: the disjuncture between public opinion and policy elites at the decision-making and implementation stages; the relationship between principals (states) and agents; and the dynamic between international and domestic arenas of policy-making. Offering a comparative analytical framework to empirically map the variations that exist across countries and policy stages and levels, this essay disaggregates the various components and actors involved in migration policy-making. It suggests that in order to test the gap thesis, a more nuanced empirical analysis of an expanded migration policy field composed of multiple actors and venues is warranted.

We seek to shape an agenda for the growing interest in using sociological approaches to study the European Union (EU). In order to deepen and broaden the Europeanization agenda, the article points to how sociology can help reveal the ‘social bases’ of European integration (i.e. processes of European Union), as well as identify effects on European society that might reconnect EU studies with key comparative political economy debates about the European ‘varieties of capitalism’ and its models of economy and society. Unfortunately, however, ‘sociological’ approaches towards the EU have mostly been wrongly equated with the ‘constructivist turn’ in EU studies, and its characteristic preference for ‘soft’ qualitative discursive methods and meta-theory. We argue that, rather than turning to culture, identity or social theory for inspiration, an empirical sociological approach to the EU would reintroduce social structural questions of class, inequality, networks and mobility, as well as link up with existing approaches to public opinion, mobilization and claims-making in the political sociology of the EU. To conclude, the article identifies some exemplary studies along these lines.